We compared Snowflake and Firebolt based on our user's reviews across various parameters. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Both Snowflake and Firebolt receive high marks for performance, user-friendliness, and cost-effectiveness, attracting users with their data management solutions. Snowflake is praised for its powerful performance, scalability, and speedy query execution, coupled with a positive customer service experience and a straightforward licensing model. The platform’s ability to handle large workloads and manage numerous concurrent users efficiently stands out, as does its positive return on investment. Firebolt is recognized for its swifter deployment process, exceptional query speeds, and cost-efficiency, made possible by its elastic scalability and intuitive interface. While its documentation and pricing model clarity could be improved, Firebolt's competitive pricing and flexible licensing options are well-received, along with the commendable customer support. Despite their distinct advantages and minor areas for improvement, both platforms excel in enhancing data analytics and operational efficiency for their users.
The summary above is based on 76 interviews we conducted recently with Snowflake and Firebolt users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Firebolt is fast for analytical purposes. For example, we have analytical data in our data warehouse, and Firebolt can quickly query it to generate quick results."
"Very easy to use and easy to query."
"Can be leveraged with respect to better performance, auto tuning and competition."
"The most valuable feature has been the Snowflake data sharing and dynamic data masking."
"It has great flexibility whenever we are loading data and performs ELT (extract, load, transform) techniques instead of ETL."
"The technical support on offer is excellent."
"This solution has helped our organization by being easy to maintain and having good technical support."
"All the people who are working with Snowflake are extremely happy with it because it is designed from a data-warehousing point of view, not the other way around. You have a database and then you tweak it and then it becomes a data warehouse."
"Its performance is a big advantage. When you run a query, its performance is very good. The inbound and outbound share features are also very useful for sharing a particular database. By using these features, you can allow others to access the Snowflake database and query it, which is another advantage of this solution. It has good security, and we can easily integrate it. We can connect it with multiple source systems."
"Firebolt's engine takes a long time to start because it needs to make engine calls."
"Currently, Snowflake doesn't support unstructured data."
"It would benefit from an administration that allows you to be aware of your credit consumption once you have the service so that you may be sure how many credits you are consuming when you use the platform and to make sure that you are making the most efficient use of these resources. In other words, to improve their interface so that you may monitor the consumption of your credits on Cloud."
"We would like to be able to do modeling with Snowflake. It should support statistical modeling."
"There are some challenges with loading unstructured data and integrating some message queues or brokers. In one project, we had a problem connecting to one of the message queues and we had to take a different route altogether on Microsoft Azure."
"In future releases, it can also support full unstructured data."
"It would be better if they had a data profile tool that tells me where the gaps are in my time series data."
"The cost efficiency and monitoring of this solution could be improved. It's easy to spend a lot on Snowflake and it does offer monitoring tools but they're pretty basic."
"They do have a native connector to connect with integration tools for loading data, but it would be much better to have the functionality built-in."
Firebolt is ranked 14th in Cloud Data Warehouse with 1 review while Snowflake is ranked 1st in Cloud Data Warehouse with 94 reviews. Firebolt is rated 9.0, while Snowflake is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Firebolt writes "Can quickly query it to generate quick results". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Snowflake writes "Good usability, good data sharing and elastic compute features, and requires less DBA involvement". Firebolt is most compared with Microsoft Azure Synapse Analytics and Yellowbrick Cloud Data Warehouse, whereas Snowflake is most compared with BigQuery, Azure Data Factory, Teradata, Vertica and AWS Lake Formation.
See our list of best Cloud Data Warehouse vendors.
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